He'd been warned.  He'd been warned by his mother and his father, by his grandmother and his older sister and even a neighbor or two, sometimes with a firm hand for emphasis.  Everyone knew that the forest on the east edge of town was home to spirits and faeries, elves and faefolk, and the town had an easy alliance with those folk of the woods.  The town laid out offerings to the magical-folk four times a year and didn't enter the forest without permission.  In return, the magical-folk left the townsfolk in peace.

But Edward was a curious lad and ever since he'd heard the description of a dryad from a wandering merchant, he'd wanted to see one.  He wanted to know what it was to look upon the lithe, magical female form of one of the treefolk.  And so, early one morning, despite the warnings, he snuck into the woods.

The sun was coming up, which was nice because the shade and dew of the forest had chilled him to occasional shivers.  The forest was thick with the smell of damp earth and bright with forty shades of green, but he'd been walking into the forest for nearly half an hour and hadn't seen even a glimmer of magic.

"Come to think of it," he whispered, trying to convince himself, "I've never seen a faerie.  Maybe they don't exist."

A whisper of sound, movement without wind, caught at the edge of hearing and Edward turned to look, but caught only the hint of a shape - the curve of hip and slender waist, a thin graceful wrist, a hand braced on the trunk of a tree, before she was gone.  His heart pounding, he hurried in the direction of the movement.

Edward walked around the broad base of the tree, but the figure was gone, there was just a small clearing carpeted in short, yellow-green grass.  He turned to look back the way he'd come - no one.

"Hello?" he called.

"You should not have come."

The voice was deeper than he'd expected, and angry.  Edward spun back around to see what he had come to see.

She was tall and though her wooden trunk bore some resemblance to that of a matronly woman, wide hips and large breasts, but her legs were a thick tangle of long roots, her face was a broad, knotty caricature of an old woman's visage crowned with a huge, green leafed canopy  She had six arms, three to each side with fingers like switches.

"You've broken truce," she rumbled, "and are mine to do with as I wish."  She grabbed him in one of her long fingered hands and bent him over one of her immense roots.  Edward had received enough spankings in his lifetime to know what came next, to know what those long, switch-like fingers would feel like.

"Wait!" he screamed.

The tree-woman paused.  "You wish to beg for mercy, human?"

Edward swallowed hard.  "No, just ... take down my pants first?"